Book of Days
Published on 28. April 2022
184 pages
978-1-80017-179-4 (ISBN)
Description
Book of Days is a long poem recounting a journey along the popular pilgrimage route, or 'Camino' to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Animated by song and conversation, the poem is filled with the stories of those encountered along the way, combining a multi-voiced soundscape with vivid verbal sketches of landscape and architecture. The possibilities and contradictions of a twenty-first-century pilgrimage are revealed: inevitably informed by tourism and technology, yet offering new kinds of fellowship and connection in an age of individualism and rootlessness. Book of Days can be read as a travel memoir, a meditation on community and solitude, on friendship and sisterhood, and on spirituality. What pilgrims seek on setting out and what they discover as they go prove to be complementary.
Phoebe Power's debut collection, Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. Book of Days extends the formal and thematic concerns of the first book, travelling a new set of paths but with the same restless curiosity and celebratory wonder.
Phoebe Power's debut collection, Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. Book of Days extends the formal and thematic concerns of the first book, travelling a new set of paths but with the same restless curiosity and celebratory wonder.
Reviews / Votes
'It is a celebration of being alive, of lives lived, of the world around us; it's soothing in its meditative comfort. It captures the beauty and difficulty of being...It's a narrative for the senses: I can hear the clack of walking poles, the clink of scallop shell, the quena flute and bagpipes; I can feel feel the rhythm of the salsa and jive and am refreshed by sweet peach juice.'Harriet Mercer, The Arts Desk 'Phoebe Power's Book of Days is a glorious chaplet of fragmented pathways and possibilities.'
?Andre Bagoo, The Poetry Society 'Book of Days is an open-hearted and humane exploration of faith and our often contradictory attitudes towards it. It is clever enough to hold the ambiguity, tension and curiosity carried in a journey towards belief but also rings with lived experience.'
Sarah Westcott, ARTEMISpoetry
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
File size
1,35 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-80017-179-4 (9781800171794)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Phoebe Power was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in Cumbria and currently lives in York. She is the author of Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018), which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and a Somerset Maugham Award, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Seamus Heaney Prize, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Further publications include Sea Change, an illustrated pamphlet based on a commission from the National Trust about the Durham Coast (Guillemot Press, 2021, with Katrina Porteous), and Harp Duet (2016).
